Kushal: Hi there. Welcome to “On the Flip Side”, a podcast for anyone who wants to live their best sales life. We're going to be talking to buyers, sales managers, SDRs and AEs about things like, what does it take to be a great sales manager, or how can you go home happy month after month? So let's dive right in. 

Hi folks. Welcome to another episode of “On the Flip Side” with Wingman. I’m Kushal, and today's episode is going to be about all things go-to-market with Brent Keltner. Brent is the Founder and President of Winalytics, a go-to-market and revenue acceleration consultancy that helps companies build their go-to-market strategy across sales, marketing and customer success teams. Before starting Winalytics, Brent spent more than a decade as a revenue leader in enterprise to early stage companies. He's also a PhD in Social Sciences from Stanford University. Welcome to the show. Brent, great to have you here.

Brent Keltner: Hey, Kushal, very excited to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. 

Kushal: So to jump right into it, we obviously have to start of 2022, just before it, so what do you think are really the top trends to look out for in 2022 and beyond? 

Brent Keltner: Yeah, in our kind of pre-call, we were talking about a few things. I mean, just this point that it's an incredibly noisy buyer environment. And we work in all kinds of sectors, higher ed, ad-tech to manufacturing companies to sell into manufacturer, manufacturers to sell B2B SaaS software – it's endemic in every sector. Buyers are overwhelmed with information coming at them, checked out a little bit. So for us, we think that that means a couple of things. It means (a) you got to get better and better at content, a great content… There's stats out there that says you know, 70% of companies are increasing the amount of content production, only 30% have a clear strategy linked to the buyer journey. You got to get really good at linking your content to a buyer journey telling a story about buyer value, that's number one. Number two is we know the cost of getting a first meeting is going up and up and up and up. So we are doing a lot of work with teams on moving for more ad hoc prospecting, I run a single campaign, every SDR every AE has their own campaign. They're just scrambling to get meetings to build a programmatic prospecting approach, right. Create a 90 day plan, quarter by quarter of what personas am I going after with what value prop and what content, and figure out where am I winning quicker, so we can double down. That's trend number two. And trend number three, we're just saying is related is building up… build a platform value prop, right. We know that every single company is now selling to six to eight personas, well, they're probably three or four different types of unique value. And I can give some examples where we get in that different personas care about. So you got to tell a story to each buyer about what's in it for them, hyper personalization, but then connected to a broader story about how you provide value for the company overall. And if you build the platform value prop, what it means is you get a lot more swings in the back because you can go after four or five individuals at once. You may only hit with one. But if you've done a good job on this is what's in it for you, and this is how it connects to other conversation, it's a lot easier to see where you get a hit and then expand the conversation just to multithread your sales conversation. So those are the three that I would highlight. 

Kushal: Brent, just to go back a little bit to what you said about programmatic prospecting, right. How is it really different from just prospecting?

Brent Keltner: Yeah, so I think in our book is a story about a company called AdmitHub, now they're called Mainstay. And we did some work with some a couple of years ago in their early growth phase where they were just doing what, you know, HubSpot sequences, right, to end just, you know, kind of email after email after email, content linkages, seeing what people would engage in. They actually call that spray and pray. So the Brian Ruleman who is the Director of Sales and Marketing…

Kushal: And they were saying it didn’t work?

Brent Keltner: No, it worked fine. What it did was it got them a lot of meetings with directors, and assistant directors and managers. They're getting a lot of meetings with people that wanted to come take a demo of this transformational conversational AI product which can help colleges and universities with yield admissions and rolling more scenes, reducing melt, retention, and then they needed multiple conversations to get to the economic buyer. So it was not very fascinating, created something they talked about as the big cheese campaigns. “Let's go to the provost, let's go to the VP of Enrollment Management. Let's go to the VP of Success. Let's go to the CIO. Let's test different subject lines. Let's test different content assets. See where it's landing in terms of engagement. How many meetings are we getting and how many of those meetings are progressing? And so really just creating like a test plan basically is, here's my CIO, the three campaigns I have, same subject line of varying different content assets”, right, same something about whatever the variation is. 

But so thinking about it in that way that I want every campaign is an opportunity to learn about what a target buyer and persona values, and you should be building your campaign strategy in a way to be doing direct head to head comparisons on where do you win quicker, and where you win quicker means getting a meeting, but getting a good meeting. So when they actually did the data analytics, what they found out was if they started with a director, 7-8% first meeting to call close, and they started with an AVP or higher, 22%. So spending the time to get to that AVP and higher, hugely valuable, doesn't mean you go after the director. But once you've got the director engaged, go after the AVP with a value messages, you know. I love a story that Brian told at the end of those campaigns where they had a call with Kent State and one of the clever things they did that we also advocate is multiple media types, email, calls, voicemails send a print mailer of different types, they sent a book from their co-founder, Kirk Delauria. So Brian had a call with Kent State where they got the provost VP of success, VP of enrollment in management and the provost opened the call and said, I'm on the call, VP of enrollment and VP of success, we've all read your book, we're ready to go. They close the deal with that campus like 75 days later for 80k because they had intentionally gone after their target buyers, engaged them with something they cared about. So individual campaigns should be part of a test plan for how do I win with each of my buyers with value prop works. That's programmatic prospecting

Kushal: That sounds like a lot of experimentation and really having the right mindset when it comes to running these campaigns is really running them, measuring and then really learning and putting those earnings back into the next set that you plan to run. What do you think stops companies from doing it maybe?

Brent Keltner: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, when we think about the prospecting experimentation, and we say the same thing when it comes to skills coaching is, I mean, literally with your prospecting experiments, you need to spend there maybe 10% more of your time. With good skills coaching, we say an hour a week, 3 to 5% of your time. But in the heat of the battle – I gotta get more meetings, I gotta close more deals, I gotta shut down my numbers – I think it's easy just to lose track of the things that we do to build conditioning. So what stops companies honestly is leadership not making the commitment. Leadership not making the commitment whether you know, the VP level, the CEO level, all of the best engagements we've had is those are saying, we are going to be intentional in our work, we are going to practice great, go-to-market teams practice, good go to market teams usually have a good market opportunity they don't fully execute, because they don't commit to being intentional in their work, just the extra 3 to 10%, stretch yourself a little bit to win faster, honestly. And that's one of the things you ask about phrases we think about recording at the end is ‘learn quicker, grow faster – the quicker you learn from your markets, from your buyers, from your peers, the faster you will win in the market’. So leadership has to commit to, old world is about product and execution, new world product and execution matters. I gotta put a layer on top to always figure out quicker, what matters to my buyers, how do I capture my buyers success, sell that forward? Because I will grow faster. If I just spend the time to be intentional about that. 

Kushal: Brent, it sounds like it must have been difficult along the way to sort of explain this shift from the Old World to the New World. Not everyone wants to probably invest that right. Like sometimes people just wanted to hit their quota, they just want to get the next deal, they just want to make you know their earnings. So what are some of the biggest changes and the challenges that you've seen when it comes to creating?

Brent Keltner: It's… you introduced me as… I started out as a PhD Social Sciences and made a transition to being a revenue leader and successfully now do consulting around it. But that for me in the early years was a big barrier. It's like what the hell do you know about business, PhD Social Sciences, right? I mean, you're academic, I think, honestly, I think what's changed and what we pick up on to say, you know, success, it's kind of two levers is really in this really noisy buyer environment, where you know, because you've read all the research that they do 70% before they ever get on the phone with you, they go to your website, competitor's website, they go to peer review sites, right, they're gonna learn a lot about you, they're often done their homework, are you really going to show up and tell them more about their product? Or are you going to use a very narrow window to understand what they care about the most? So I think that's just like, “oh yeah, I got a very short attention span, what's the best way to use that time”. And there's more and more that's come along around value driven selling or customer centric selling, or even challenger selling, which is a little bit different. But it's all on this idea of “I got to anchor on a buyer challenge, I got to anchor on a buyer.” And what we say is, that's all right, but stop thinking about selling, start thinking about what's your buyer success statement, and where do you have a match? Start thinking about yourself as a problem solver because you can't sell anything, I mean, Neil Rackham, several decades ago, SPIN Selling, brilliant dude documented it as a social scientist would. Fire and sellers don't close deals, buyers close deals. Sellers close deals by guiding buyers through a pain point, right, that is significant enough that they're willing to spend the time to invest in it. So think of yourself as a guide, I mean you’re a problem solver. And when you get to that pain, you get your buyer to confirm it. So I think there's been enough of a trend right that we just, people are kind of realizing, I gotta break through the noise by figuring out what they care about the most and anchoring on it. And then for us, honestly, just anchoring on the sports analogy, we say whether it's following a cricket team in India, or, you know, following a baseball team or a basketball team or soccer team, we just say, if you followed a sports team and they didn't have a playbook, how serious would you think they were? And if they didn't practice their playbook? How serious would you think they were? And if they had an exemption for some high performing players for not practicing, how serious would you think they were? Now, once you hold up the mirror, how much do you practice on your team? Great, go-to-market teams practice, great sports teams practice. If you're a professional sports player, and you say, I'm too experienced to practice, you're underperforming. And it's the same with go-to-market teams.

Kushal: Brent, I think we've got so many quotes from what you just spoke about. I can dial it back a little bit, you spoke about kind of focusing on the buyer and creating value for them. It's a little easier said than done at times, especially when the messaging has to kind of flow from a large team. What do you think are really the challenges of people actually adopting this mindset? And how you really work with your customers, for instance, to overcome that?

Brent Keltner: Yeah, and there's a related question, another podcast, or Lori Richardson asked me, which is, hey, you know, sales often gets the messaging for marketing. So what do you do about that? And it's the same in every case. The very first thing we do in any engagement is build value plays, not what's your product? What value does your product derive for a buyer? And product capabilities are part of that value play. 

But what's more important, the integral part is how would your buyer describe success? If you went to your top three buyers, and if you're a good seller, you've got reference clients that even if you don't do the expansion motion, you go back to when you need a reference for your next sale, right. So that's just part of any good sales team is stays in touch with their good buyers to sell forward, right. Proof, go back to them and ask right - where did you see the most value in our product? What was the before and after case and marketing gives you a messaging frame - go back to your buyers and ask them. We, in our work with teams always, are talking about sellers, we build a library of success stories from clients. You as a seller, you should have some of your own and then you should master some from that team library. Because at the end of the day, the proof in the value you provide is in your customer voice and your customers telling you. So the easiest way honestly to link your product of value is asking your customers how did it move you forward? What was the outcome for you? 

So I'll just give an example of a company and it relates to the tech stack question that we were talking to combine the two together. We've been doing some work recently with a company called Kinetics. And they sell an ad tech platform into both mid-market and major publishers so they work with the APs of the world, they work with the McClatchy’s of the world, you know, they work with some of them, the regional publishers, they work with AccuWeather, anybody that has media. And a lot of the work there with them on just accelerating their prospecting motion has been, hey, let's look back at your videos, let's put…  what are your key value plays? Well, it's about video revenue being more productive, you can make money from your videos, or it's about getting more engagement with those readers. So you’re drawing people to multiple videos or spending more time or scaling production a consistent way to scale production of video across your team. Just honestly, we just with them, went back to their videos, went back to their case studies, went back to some of their clients and said, Okay, how would you… how would AccuWeather describe how this helped them monetize videos, and they have a great quote from one of them. Like the 16 videos that we worked on with Kinetics drive like 70% of our revenue, boom, golden, right. Or, you know, readers that engage with his platform, we found a 50% improvement in the time on page or the time on videos. Quote, right. So boom, I mean, just capturing that stuff that your customers know we got to ask him that should not be in your prospecting cadences, right? Second or third email. This is how AccuWeather talks about it. That should be in our discovery talk tracks, right? I asked you a question. Are you working on video revenue? What's keeping you for your good discovery? Hey, when we worked with Newsweek, when we worked with AccuWeather, this was their experience. How would you think about deploying that? How would that work out for you? So building a value based selling approach starts with capturing your customer voices, telling stories, telling stories in our prospecting narrative, telling stories in our sales calls, telling stories in our land and expand motion.

Kushal: For obvious reasons obviously love the idea of telling you the stories that will really matter. And those in your customers' voices as well. Which sort of takes me to my next question, which is really around the basics of any go to market strategy, where do you really start from, you know, a company or a founder who's new to it? Where should they really start from?

Brent Keltner: The buyer persona framework which everybody knows is a really powerful framework, because it's the beginning of buyer empathy. It's like, Hey, who is my buyer? What are they thinking about? Where are they walking today? And that's the beginning of any good sales or go-to-market strategy. And so what we would say is, then think about what is the value you're providing to that buyer? And how would we know? What are other similar customers where you've provided that value? So for us, the go-to-market strategy starts with who's your buyer? Why are they buying? What value are we providing to them? And what again, go back to customer stories? Can I work? Can I prove that and then go to market strategy really accelerates when you start to connect to what we think of as a platform, value prop, where you are connecting those different buyer personas across different types of value. 

And I'll just give you two quick stories on that agility, which is a sequel analytics platform goes from kind of data and all parts of the enterprise to one platform to share that. Well, with an individual user, it really is about higher productivity, right. I can share my code, I can save my code, I can repurpose my code, I don't have to redo things. So that's how I'm gonna get and they have a freemium model, I start there, if I go to that person's manager, I want to get, analytics manager ,10, 20 people, I can increase your team's productivity by 30%. Because now they're storing and re sharing. If I want to roll up to a CDO or VP of analytics, it's about 30%, higher productivity across the enterprise, and 30% faster time to business insights. Because those people are tasked with, do I know where my breakdown and logistics are? Do I know which skews aren't available on my retail shelf? Do I know where my marketing, sales dollars are winning? So I've got three different value props, you just make your life easier and do an analytics, make your team more productive, faster time to Business Insights. I'm telling a different story. But I'm connecting those across those or augments which is a medical that mean basically recording, note-taking automated recording in a doctor's office, right. So the doctor can pay attention to the patient, they have just an awesome land and expand motion where they will go first to general medicine, very high pain doctors are scrambling around, right just trying to meet everybody's need, not create budgets, but you can get a quick win, right on automated note taking. Then they'll go to a wealthier practice, like orthopedics and say, hey, you know, provide higher touch service because you're automating. And now you're building scale across general practice and a couple of wealthier practice areas. And you go to the CFO and say, Hey, look at our doctor productivity case, we can say basically make your you know, two or three more visits a day per doctor, what would that be worth your hospital? So very direct financial ROI case, right? So they've got a physician burnout for the general medicine, they've got a higher touch care for you know, wealthier practices, like orthopedics. And they have an economic ROI case to the CFO, the platform value prop in both those cases, as I'm selling individual value, but I'm always conscious of how value to one persona connects to another in a very noisy environment. You should think about four personas, and what's my value to each and how do I connect it because you get four swings at the bat and every account, right and once you get that one, a single you get on base, you can start now to connect across for those runs. So I think platform value prop in a noisy environment, just critical to a successful go to market motion.

Kushal: I think that was incredibly useful for companies who want to work on their go-to-market strategy, just figure out what the basic blocks are. Where do you think companies are still making the most mistakes?

Brent Keltner: Honestly, it's just I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but honestly, it's just being convinced that if I just share enough cool stuff about my profit, they're gonna, something's gonna resonate land, and they'll be able to pick out the use case. So that's the biggest mistake we see is it's okay to start with your product. And we tell a story in the book about immersion that has a transformational, it's immersive, it's what I want to say it's an immersive AI kind of training product. It's a blend of AI and an avatar, which is and they help with leadership and diversity and inclusion and customer service, and sales training. 

So doing discovery, before sharing the product, you'd have to do rediscovery because people didn't understand the product. So fine to talk about your product at first. I think true fit also, retail personalization, sometimes you have a transformational product, people have to see and experience it. Okay, but then what you need to do is rather than relying on the product features is get them to share, how would that help you? What business problem would you apply that to where's the first place you and want to apply that or we did a story with a snippet with a woman, Kristen Brown, who I've worked with for years, she'll just say, hey, if I want to wave a magic wand, and you have this technology for 12 months, what's the biggest problem that would solve for you, what would be your better state in 6 to 12 months? Or as she says, always, give me three things that it would help them with. So even if you start with your product, give it to a buyer, urgency around a goal. Because if you don't, often you just won't have enough interest to go to a second meeting, you'll get a demo, they're kicking the tires, they're interested, but you haven't helped them envision a future state that makes them happier, to spend more time with you. Because you have to remember, in selling the number one thing that kills deals is not competition, it's doing nothing. It's the inertia around doing something different. So and in selling, when you buy, you're gonna do something different and gonna pay for the privilege of doing it, there's got to be a better future that you can feel, right, and that gets you excited to take the steps forward. So I think that's the biggest mistake is, even if we start with our product, your product has to point to a better future. And you have to guide your buyers towards imagining that better future. And what are the concrete steps they can take to realizing that and make it really visceral.

Kushal: It sounds like the world that you're describing, of your go-to-market strategy and sort of the process is really hinged on data, creativity, in some sense and also just storytelling, telling the right story or really helping buyers kind of uncover that before and after states in some sense.

Brent Keltner: Yeah, I think that's all accurate. And I would just say one thing, you said at the outset, I was trained as a qualitative researcher, I didn't do big data. I did small data. I would do for the interviews in a study, and I'd put it in an Excel spreadsheet and code 01 to see the patterns. And most people aren't going to be trained as qualitative researchers, you don't need to do that. But what I'll just say is, small end data is what go to market teams have and what sales teams have. And so just to go back to why don't people do this, one of the things we find that does help you do it is you just get in the habit of team based learning, right? And when we do engagements, it's a week, an hour a week of team based learning, an hour next week of individual coaching, an hour of team based learning individual coaching. And individual coaching is applying tools in your playbook, which we all agree to our deals, and then we come back and we share stories from the field. And so when you share stories from the field, and so let's go back to the let's go back to the OD medics example. In their case, the team based learning might be Hey, and what were the blockers? Where did you see things fall out and getting to the CFO? Where did that physician productivity message land? And where did it land? And did it matter if they were a single hospital or a Regional Hospital, right. And where did it get into the wealthier practice of the message land that, hey, this can up level your, the quality of your physician care. So the pattern, it's the pattern recognition, the data, as you say, and the stories it's part of that team base and when you want to shift your mindset in almost anything, right whether it's sports, whether it's in a faith tradition, or whatever doing it in a community, you will make much quicker progress. 

So a go to market team has to be a community committed to learning faster from their market and teams. And all the teams that we see are most successful, they typically have team based learning that is also within and across teams. So I think of Robin or I think of TrueFit where they built around the sales team but then they invited marketing, they invited in customer success, they invited in product to hear bi weekly basis to hear where are we winning faster. So yes, data, recognizing patterns across our team so we can have the personalized conversation with each buyer by segment by role and then stories, right, that really capture that in a visceral way to bring it to life with our customers.

Kushal: Brent, I feel like we can go on talking about this for quite a while. But in the interest of time, I'm going to go towards maybe my last question for today, which is really around you and maybe the number one impact that you would like to drive in the world?

Brent Keltner: I have a pretty deep Christian faith, right, I was that's, that's my faith tradition. And there are lots of great faith traditions, you know, that people have different walks. So for me bringing together that, my personal life and my business life, around this concept of authenticity, is really powerful. Because for me, I wasn't trained as a seller who could pitch my product and sell ice to an Eskimo and close things, I really wanted to spend time with people where I can add value and help them. So this idea that selling really is about customer is about service, and about problem solving, for our buyers, to me, just honestly, gives me a ton of energy, because not only I was also an athlete, so I'm very competitive and love the bullet points on the board. So the idea that we can be more successful by doing what's right by other people, and honestly, just learning a lot more in our day, because we're having conversation solving problems. I mean, that's like the Holy Grail for me, right? We went faster, we enjoy our work more, provide better service to our buyers and customers. So this idea that we should have authentic conversations, and we should build teams with skills that are open to collaborating and learning and being problem solving, problem solvers, you know, that that honestly work and kind of tap into everybody's human potential and drive for authenticity. I mean, drive for that. That's what motivates me. And that's what gets me excited about the work.

Kushal: Brent, I'm guessing that's also why your company’s named Winalytics because you talked about winning as a community and….

Brent Keltner: Yeah, win by being smarter, quicker. I mean, being smarter just by recognizing patterns being intentional about our work, right. That's the work we do 100%.

Kushal: Great, thank you so much Brent. I think this is an incredible conversation. Thanks so much for being On the Flip Side with me. 

Brent Keltner: You know, I love the call, Kushal. Thanks for a lot of great questions. You're really good at it. 

Kushal: Thank you.

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